One to Watc - Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity ppt

The One to Watch
Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


Edited by Bruce Girard
In collaboration with

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) Geneva office
and
The Communication for Development Group
Research, Extension and Training Division
Sustainable Development Department
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© FAO 2003
Electronic Edition Version 1.0
Cover graphic: Claudia Rodríguez


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The One to Watch – Radio New ICTs and Interactivity

Table of Contents










Foreword iii

Preface v

Section I - Concepts and Context
1

Chapter 1
Radio and the Internet: Mixing media to bridge the divide 2
Bruce Girard


Chapter 2
Take Five: A handful of essentials for ICTs in development 21
Alfonso Gumucio Dagron


Chapter 3

Linking Rural Radio to New ICTs in Africa: Bridging the rural digital divide 39
Jean-Pierre Ilboudo and Riccardo del Castello


Chapter 4
The Information Highways are still Unpaved: The Internet and West African
community radio 57
Lynda Attias and Johan Deflander

Chapter 5
Public Radio and the Internet in the United States 69
Robert Ottenhoff

Section II - Gateways
74

Chapter 6 Community Multimedia Centres:
Creating digital opportunities for all 76
Stella Hughes
Chapter 7
The Kothmale Model: Using radio to make the Internet visible 90
Ian Pringle and MJR David

The One to Watch – Radio New ICTs and Interactivity


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Chapter 8
Creating & Sustaining ICT Projects in Mozambique 109
Birgitte Jallov

Chapter 9
The Russian Rural Information Network 121
Nancy Bennett

Section III - Networks
134

Chapter 10
Awaking from the Big Sleep: Kantor Berita 68H 136
Martin Hala and Santoso


Chapter 11
The
Agencia Informativa Púlsar
145
Bruce Girard

Chapter 12
InterWorld Radio:
“The kind of thing that connects you to the world”
157
Francesca Silvani

Section IV - Communication with migrants
170

Chapter 13

Blending Old and New Technologies: Mexico’s indigenous radio service
messages 172
José Manuel Ramos and Ángel Díez
Chapter 14
Callos and Guatitas
: Radio and migration in Ecuador and Spain 180
Luis Dávila and José Manuel López

Section V - Rural Radio: Cases from USA, Africa and Latin America
191
Chapter 15
Farm and Rural Radio in the United States: Some beginnings and models.192
Robert L. Hilliard

Chapter 16
After 50 years: The role and use of rural radio in Africa 199
Jean-Pierre Ilboudo

Chapter 17
Radio Chaguarurco: Now you’re not alone 211
Bruce Girard

About the authors
230




- iii -
Foreword

Ester Zulberti
We live in an era characterised by rapid
technological advances in the telecommunication
sector which affect all spheres of human activity.
New communication tools, services and practices
have emerged and information has become the
most distinguishing trait of contemporary
societies.
Knowledge and information can greatly impact on agricultural
production and food security. Improved communication systems can help
rural communities access relevant and timely information on agricultural
and rural development issues. With the dramatic expansion of various
forms of electronic interchange, including electronic mail and the
Internet, unprecedented opportunities exist for knowledge and
information sharing and dissemination among development agents, policy
makers and the beneficiaries themselves. Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be effective means of providing
development workers with huge amounts of relevant information on
markets, technology, prices, successful experiences, credit facilities,
government services and policies, weather, crop, livestock and natural
resource protection.
However, in order to have a significant impact on development
programmes, ICT services must be readily accessible and meaningful to
broad segments of rural populations and the information they carry must
be adapted and disseminated in formats and languages that they can
comprehend. They must also serve people’s needs for entertainment,
cultural enlightenment, and human contact – needs which, despite being
strongly felt by us all, are too often overlooked by development
professionals.
The convergence of ICTs with rural radio can serve these purposes,

providing a powerful support for harnessing and communicating
knowledge for development, for ensuring wider access to information,
and for permitting local cultural expression and development. This is
especially true in rural areas, where radio is an important mechanism for
the rapid diffusion of knowledge and information in a diversity of
languages and formats and where its long history and time-tested
participatory methodology make it the most widespread and popular
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communication medium. The combined use of the two media not only
allows wider access to a wealth of information, but it also provides an
effective mechanism for bottom up articulation of real development
needs.
This publication provides an overview of the most significant
experiences in combining radio and ICTs to sustainable development. It is
a result of numerous attempts by FAO’s Communication for
Development Group to foster information exchange and collaborative
partnerships in rural radio initiatives. We hope that the reader will find in
these pages some useful insights for stimulating discussion and concrete
action in the context of their own development work.



Ester Zulberti
Chief, Extension, Education and Communication Service
Sustainable Development Department
FAO

The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity

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Preface
Bruce Girard
In February 2001, the FAO organised an
International Workshop on rural radio entitled
Information and Communication Technologies
Servicing Rural Radio: New Contents, New
Partnerships
. The fifty workshop participants
exchanged experiences and developed ideas for
how radio and ICTs could be used together to support rural communities.
We were enthused by the idea of combining radio with the Internet and
with its potential for breathing new life into radio and for making the
Internet’s information truly accessible to rural populations. As Carleen
Gardner, FAO’s Assistant Director General for Information, said at the
conclusion of the workshop:
Sometimes looked down upon as the “poor relation” of
television, and certainly considered old-fashioned compared
to the Internet, radio today has become the one to watch.
That may sound like a bad pun, but as our discussions here
this week have proved, radio’s stock is rising like never
before. Still the most portable communication medium, the
most widespread and the most economical, radio is now
proving itself versatile enough to go hand-in-hand with the
Web.
This book grew out of that workshop. It focuses on the use of the
Internet by radio stations in their efforts to support initiatives for
democratic and sustainable development and it includes insights and

experiences from all parts of the globe.
It was also inspired by two conferences organised by Comunica
and sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The first, in Kuala
Lumpur in 1999, was attended by broadcasters, Internet activists and
policy makers from Asia and the second, held in Florida in 2000 focused
on the convergence of independent and community radio and ICTs in
Latin America and the Caribbean. Both of these conferences were
attached to the annual gathering of the International Institute of
Communications, an organisation founded thirty-four years ago with the
then unique idea of bringing together people from broadcasting and
telecommunications.
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While Ms. Gardner’s comment inspired the title of the book,
reminding us of the versatility and potential of the radio ICT
combination, the subtitle
Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity
, merits a few
words here. This book is not concerned with how individuals or
communities can interact with radio stations or the Internet via instant
polling, “personalised” web interfaces, phone in radio programmes or
remote broadcasts from the town market. Instead it focuses on
interactivity as a social communication process – people and communities
interacting with each other rather than with the media. It is about how
radio, in combination with the Internet, can better inform people about
themselves and the world, stimulating (interactive) communication within
and between communities, and leading to a common understanding of
problems and to common proposals for their resolution.
The chapters in this book are grouped into five sections. The five

chapters in the first section introduce concepts and context important for
understanding and analysing radio and Internet projects. The next three
sections of the book each look at a number of cases of radio and ICT
projects, organised into the broad categories described in chapter one –
networking projects, community intermediary or gateway projects, and
projects connecting migrants with their home communities. The final
section includes three chapters with information that will be particularly
useful to readers unfamiliar with rural radio and the essential role it plays
in people’s lives. Jean-Pierre Ilboudo and Robert Hilliard situate rural
radio in a historical perspective, considering the development of the
medium in Africa over the past half century and over a span of almost
100 years in the USA. A chapter from Latin America illustrates how a
“typical” rural radio station works to fulfil a community’s day to day
communication needs.
There are numerous people to thank for this book. Loy Van
Crowder first conceived it when he was in the Research, Extension and
Training Division of the FAO. The staff members of the Communication
for Development Group provided support throughout the production
process and Marianne Sinko designed the book. Claudia Rodríguez
designed the cover. Scott Eavenson translated chapters four, thirteen and
fourteen from their original French and Spanish. Amy Mahan provided
insights, editing assistance and invaluable support. Reinhard Keune, who
passed away a few months before the book was completed, deserves
special recognition, both for his support of this project and for the vision
and commitment that marked his career at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation
and his two terms as president of the UNESCO’s International
Programme for the Development of Communication.


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Section I

Concepts and Context

This first section includes five chapters that
introduce important concepts and context for
understanding and analysing radio and Internet
projects.
The introductory chapter,
Mixing Media to Bridge the Divide,

provides an overview of the how radio and the Internet are being used
together in various development and democratic communication projects.
It also introduces the book’s structure, classifying the work being done
into the three types of projects that are separately examined in the
following sections.
Alfonso Gumucio’s chapter,
Take Five: A handful of essentials for
ICT in development
,

takes a critical look at the Internet’s development
potential and proposes five “non-negotiable conditions for ICTs in
development”.
In the chapter by Jean-Pierre Ilboudo and Riccardo del Castello,
Linking Rural Radio to New ICTs in Africa: Bridging the rural digital
divide
, the authors present the FAO’s experience with rural radio in
Africa and recent efforts to introduce ICTs into rural radio as a way of
promoting new content and new partnerships.

Lynda Attias and Johan Deflander also aim to separate the hype
from the reality. Their chapter,
The Information Highways are still
Unpaved
, weaves together comments of West African radio journalists
and the authors’ own observations and proposes an approach for
integrating radio and the Internet more suitable to the West African
reality.
In his chapter on
Public Radio and the Internet in the United
States
, Robert Ottenhoff, formerly the Chief Operating Officer of the
Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the USA, provides three examples
of how the Internet and radio complement each other in the country that
invented the Internet.


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Chapter 1

Radio and the Internet:
Mixing media to bridge the
divide
Bruce Girard
At the beginning of the last century, on December 12, 1901, Guglielmo
Marconi, demonstrated the communication potential of radio technology,
transmitting three dots, Morse code for the letter “S”, from Cornwall,
England to Newfoundland in what is now Canada. Marconi’s 1901
transmission is worth noting here for two reasons.
First, the innovations that accompanied this early radio

transmission were the same ones that enabled modern broadcast radio.
Technology advanced at the pace we grew accustomed to in the 20
th

century and only five years after Marconi’s historic transatlantic
broadcast, radio operators on ships in the Atlantic were surprised to hear a
human voice emitting from the Marconi-built equipment instead of the
dots and dashes of Morse code. Three years after that, the first regularly
broadcasting radio station was transmitting news and recorded music
programs every Wednesday night to a handful of pre-Silicon Valley
residents of San José, California who had bought radio receivers before
there were stations to listen to.
Second, the wireless communication afforded by Marconi’s
experiment was more than just a technological advance. It was also an
important milestone for the rapid globalisation that was one of the most
significant phenomena of the last century, and of the large-scale social
and economic consequences that accompanied it. By today’s standards,
sending the letter
S
from one side of the Atlantic to the other is a modest
achievement, but Marconi’s transmission was the first real-time, speed-
of-light, global communication. For those in the centres of global
economic activity, it was a harbinger of the information society. For those
on the periphery, it was the analogue precursor of the
digital divide
.
This chapter will first examine characteristics of the two
information and communication technologies that feature in this book –
radio and the Internet. We will look at the imbalanced global expansion
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity

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of the Internet and some of the limitations that this imposes when
applying North American or European models for its use in the less-
industrialised regions, especially in rural areas. We will then turn to some
of the characteristics that have enabled radio’s success in the same
regions.
The primary argument of this chapter, and indeed of the collection
of chapters in the book, is that the combination of the Internet and
broadcast radio offers a new and potent range of possibilities for
development communication projects. The second section of the chapter
looks at some of these projects, grouping them into three broad and
occasionally overlapping categories:
•
Projects which create or support networks of broadcasters;
•
Projects in which the radio station serves as a gateway or
community intermediary, providing mediated but effective and
meaningful access to the
knowledge and information potential
of
the Internet;
•
Projects which use the radio/Internet combination to facilitate
communication with migrant communities, providing mediated but
effective access to the
communication potential
of the Internet.

Finally, there are some preliminary conclusions and suggestions for
the way forward.
Internet for Development
A century after Marconi’s transmission, the so-called
digital divide
occupies an important place on the agenda of governments, international
agencies, and civil society organisations around the world. Over the past
few years there have been countless seminars, studies and statements
about it and various related issues such as
digital opportunities
and
Internet for development
. Governments have adopted national IT policies
and liberalised the telecommunications sector to try to attract investment.
Hundreds of new NGOs have sprung up in the last decade, first to
affordably extend the network to civil society sectors in both
industrialised and less-industrialised countries, and later to promote
effective use of it. On the intergovernmental level many UN agencies, the
G7 (later the G8) group of industrialised countries, the World Bank and
several regional bodies have put ICTs and development high on their
agenda. The World Summit on the Information Society, hosted by the
International Telecommunications Union on behalf of the United Nations,
is the latest and biggest international effort to focus international attention
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

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on the issue.

Not surprisingly, the Internet has provided the most active
forum for discussion of it – typing “digital divide” in Google’s search

engine returns about 459,000 references.
1

The debates around the digital divide and Internet for development
have focused uncovering new areas of global inequality and imagining
new opportunities for development. However, with an enthusiasm for the
new, these often overlook lessons learned in earlier efforts to understand
and change other social, economic and quality of life divides that separate
rich countries from poor ones. One of the most important of these is that
the reason people in poor countries do not have wide access to the
Internet is because they are poor – the same reason they have inadequate
water, education, healthcare, electricity, and transport
. And, while
investment in the Internet could help them improve their lives, so could
investment in water, education and healthcare.
A second similarity between the Internet and development issues
such as education and healthcare is that local participation is essential if
projects are going to address local problems or be attuned to local
capacities. As Alfonso Gumucio points out in his contribution to this
book (chapter 2), the history of development aid is strewn with the
carcasses of “white elephants”, massive projects that failed because they
did not adequately consult with local communities. Telecommunications
projects are not immune to the white elephant syndrome. We have all
heard stories of communities unable to tap into the telecom wires hanging
over their heads because of some minor regulatory or technical oversight,
and of hugely expensive telecentres that fall into disuse because of a lack
of maintenance skills or that are inaccessible to women because they fail
to adopt gender sensitive training or management policies.
In the past decade the international community has expended
tremendous effort and expense in telecom development. Major initiatives

have been taken to encourage the privatisation of State telephone
monopolies, to invite foreign direct investment in the sector and to
introduce competition. The results have been impressive in certain areas,
notably prepaid mobile telephony, which has experienced rapid take-up
wherever it has become available – primarily in urban centres. There has
been virtually no progress in making the Internet available in the least
developed countries, especially in the rural areas.
While the numbers vary according to who is counting, a quick look
at data shows how little progress has been made in extending the Internet

1
In contrast, “social divide” turns up 3,900 pages and “economic inequality” 33,000
(February 2003).
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


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to less-industrialised world. According to NUA, an Irish company that
has been tracking Internet use surveys since 1995, there are 606 million
people online in the world – about 10 percent of the world’s population.
Of these, 62 percent are in North America or Western Europe, home to
ten percent of the world’s population. The Asia/Pacific region accounts
for almost 31 percent,
2
almost two thirds of them mostly concentrated in a
few countries. Barely five percent are in Latin America. Sub-Saharan
Africa, with roughly the same population as North America and Europe
combined, has about one percent of the world’s Internet users.
3
Sixty

percent of US adults have Internet access, while in Africa, around one
percent of the population is online –half of them in South Africa and
virtually none in rural areas
. And let us not forget that one third of the
world’s population has no access to electricity, billions have never made
a telephone call, and there are nearly twice as many illiterate adults (98
percent of them in less-industrialised countries) than there are people
online. Far from making progress in efforts to bridge the digital divide,
the trends show growing inequality between the
info-rich
and the
info-
poor
.
If the only way of harnessing the Internet’s development potential
is to bridge the
digital divide
by providing rural residents of less-
industrialised countries with whatever level of service is enjoyed in the
developed world, then we should not expect to succeed in our lifetimes.
Moreover, even if we were to succeed, it would not solve the problem.
Connectivity is the tip of the iceberg and below it lie many complex
factors that impede the Internet’s take-up by the majority of the world’s
population. Among them are:
•
Illiteracy – UNESCO estimates that there are one billion illiterate
adults in the world, approximately 25 percent of the total adult
population. Most web content, especially development-oriented
content, is written;
•

Language – If you can read, can you read English? While there are
more than 6,000 languages in the world, the Internet is dominated
by English, with another dozen or so having significant presence. At

2
70 percent of these are concentrated in three countries – Japan with 56 million users,
China with 50 million and South Korea with 26 million.
3
NUA Internet Surveys, September 2002 <www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/>.
Estimates of the number of people with access to the Internet vary widely depending
on methodology and definitions used. NUA’s figures, based on a compilation of many
individual surveys, attempt to measure the number of people who accessed the
Internet at least once in the previous three months, regardless of whether they have
their own computer or Internet account. NUA’s methodology is described at
<www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/methodology.html>.
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

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least 20 percent of the world’s population speaks languages which
are almost entirely excluded from the web.
4

•
Content – You can read English, but can you find local, relevant or
contextualised content?

While technology is important, escaping from poverty requires
knowledge, and knowledge does not come from technology but from
experience and
relevant and meaningful content

, digital or not. Content
that explains useful agricultural techniques or the workings of local
markets can be transformed into knowledge and contribute to increased
production and better prices. Content about locally available traditional
medicine or about nutrition can lead to longer and better lives. Content
about rights, responsibilities and options can be both a prerequisite and a
catalyst for democracy.
It is also becoming clear that the distribution systems for
knowledge are most effective when building on the local information
systems currently in use. These local systems are not made of wire or
glass fibre, but they are human communication systems. This means that
in addition to infrastructure, successful uses of the Internet will
incorporate what Richard Heeks refers to as
community intermediaries
,
institutions and individuals that use the Internet and serve as a bridge
between it and the community members. Community intermediaries come
from the community itself. They can be midwives, teachers, agricultural
extension workers, experienced elders or others with a formal or informal
role in the local information system. The characteristics that make a good
community intermediary include “proximity, trust and knowledge
(including the ability to combine ‘techknowledge’ about ICT with
‘context knowledge’ about the environment in which it is used)”.
5

Thus, while the Internet is one route for accessing knowledge,
direct access to its infrastructure is neither the only way nor, in most
cases, the best way to use it for development. As community
intermediaries, local radio broadcasters have shown strength in the past

4
According to a study published by VilaWeb.com in 2000, based on Data from
AllTheWeb, English is the most common language, with 68.4 percent of web pages,
followed by Japanese, German and Chinese. French is in fifth place with 3 percent
and Spanish is sixth with 2.5 percent
<cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/demographics/article/0,1323,5901_408521,00.ht
ml>.
5
Richard Heeks,
Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and
Development
, 1999, Development Informatics: Working Papers, Institute for
Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester
<www.man.ac.uk/idpm/di_wp5.htm>.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


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and, with the right strategies and policies, they can play an essential role
in the future.
Radio
More than ninety years after the world’s first station was founded, radio is
still the most pervasive, accessible, affordable, and flexible mass medium
available. In rural areas, it is often the
only
mass medium available.
Low production and distribution costs have made it possible for
radio to interpret the world from local perspectives, and to respond to
local needs for information. More than any other mass communication
medium, radio speaks in the language and with the accent of its

community. Its programming reflects local interests and it can make
important contributions to both the heritage and the development of the
cultures, economies and communities that surround it.
More than any other medium, radio is local. In Latin America, for
example, while most radio is produced locally or nationally, only 30
percent of television programming comes from the region; with 62
percent produced in the United States.
6
Quechua, a language spoken by
some 10 million people in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, is all but absent
from the region’s television screens, but in Peru alone an estimated 180
radio stations regularly offer programmes in the language. The same is
true in Africa, where local radio stations produce their own programs and
speak in the hundreds of languages of their communities.
Radio is also widely available. While there are only two telephone
lines for every hundred people in Africa, there are twenty radio
receivers

per hundred – even in rural areas most households have access to a
receiver. Radio
stations
are also common. Fifteen years ago there were
only ten independent (non-State) radio stations in all of sub-Saharan
Africa; now there are thousands, many of them located in small towns
and serving rural communities. Rural residents, women, youth, ethnic and
linguistic minorities and even children have benefited from the explosion
of radio in Africa and can now see themselves reflected in the media for
the first time. Latin America never had the same State domination of the
radio, but it also experienced a boom of local and independent radio
stations in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Long before the Internet popularised the notion of the convergence
of media and telecommunications, local radio stations were fulfilling a
role as a “community telephone” with several hours a day reserved for

6
UNDP Human Development Report, 1999, p. 34.
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

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broadcasting personal messages, birth and death announcements,
invitations to parties, ordering food and supplies from the store in the next
village, calling for emergency medical assistance and even for receiving
personal medical advice from the local doctor. Many radio stations were
working in multimedia before that term was popular, too – often serving
as a community hub, with communication activities including publishing,
video production, and even operating cinemas.
In many rural areas radio is the only source of information about
market prices for crops, and thus the only defence against speculators. It
is used in agricultural extension programmes, is a vehicle for both formal
and informal education, and plays an important role in the preservation of
local language and culture.
While in some parts of the world we take radio for granted, seeing
it as little more than an accessory for an automobile, in others it fulfils a
variety of roles: it is the only mass medium that most people have access
to; it is a “personal” communication medium fulfilling the function of a
community telephone; and it is a school, the community’s primary point
of contact with the global knowledge infrastructure.
Radio has demonstrated tremendous potential to promote
development. Relevant, interesting and interactive radio enables
neglected communities to be heard and to participate in the democratic

process. And simply having a say in decisions that shape their lives
ultimately improves their living standards.
Next Generation Radio

Probably the four most important characteristics contributing to radio’s
success as a medium for development are: (1) its pervasiveness, (2) its
local nature, (3) the fact that it is an oral medium, and (4) its ability to
involve communities and individuals in an interactive social
communication process.
While the first three are fairly straightforward, it is useful to clarify
the concept of an
interactive social communication
in order to distinguish
it from
interactivity.
The latter is usually applied to the Internet and refers
to individual users’ ability to interact with a website or directly with
another individual or a company via email. Radio also offers this
possibility, via the use of telephone call in programmes, open microphone
shows, letters, etc. However, radio excels at stimulating
interactive social
communication
within a community. A local issues programme, for
example, informs listeners about a community problem and thus
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stimulates interactive communication among members of the community
as they go about their daily lives (now unmediated by the radio), possibly

leading to development of a common understanding of the problem and
proposals for its resolution. As time goes on, these proposals can be fed
back into the loop in the form of another radio programme, and further
discussed, refined and acted on in the community.
The Internet is characterised by interactivity, and, technically, its
potential in this area is far greater than radio’s. It is also a store of useful
knowledge and among its millions of pages there is a tremendous amount
of information relevant to development issues. However, the barriers we
have already looked at – access, literacy, languages, appropriate content –
present overwhelming obstacles that will have to be overcome before
most of the world’s population will be able to surf the net to find
solutions to their poverty.
Alternative models are being explored, including telecentres and
cybercafés, mentoring projects, translation and text to speech software.
Some of these are already making the Internet more accessible. Over the
past few years a number of experiments blending independent local radio
and the Internet are creating new models.
7
Similar experiments have also
been undertaken in Africa, and donors are increasingly interested in the
initiatives.
In North America and Europe many radio stations offer their
programming over the Internet, using “streaming” software such as
RealAudio or Windows Media Player (including a growing number of
Internet-only stations). Radio-Locator,
8
a website that lists radio stations
on the Internet currently has links to more than 2,500 audio streams from
stations world-wide. Many of these stations are merely extending their
reach, using the Internet to make their programmes available to

geographically distant listeners, but some are using the interactive
capabilities of the Internet to provide value-added service to local
listeners. A few examples of this are provided in Robert Ottenhoff’s
contribution about how public radio in the USA is using the Internet
(chapter 5). While the value-added services described by Ottenhoff were
designed for the USA, where many listeners have access to the Internet,

7
Many of these experiments were presented and discussed at a pair of seminars
supported by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, one examining Asian experiences and
the other focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean. See

Converging
Responsibility: Broadcasting and the Internet in Developing Countries,
<www.comunica.org/kl/> and Mixed Media / Medios Enteros: Broadcasting and the
Internet in Latin America and the Caribbean, <www.comunica.org/tampa/>.
8
<www.radio-locator.com>
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

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they nevertheless provide ideas for innovative possibilities for using the
Internet’s interactivity to enhance radio’s interactive social
communication.
Development projects experimenting with radio and the Internet
are emerging in very distinct environments and seeking to address very
different sets of problems. In general these projects have taken the three
main forms mentioned earlier in this chapter: projects to support radio
networking and exchanges, gateway or community intermediary projects,
and projects that link migrants to their home communities.

Networks
Radio networks for exchanging information and programming have been
around almost as long as broadcast radio itself. In the United States,
where commercial radio is the norm, CBS and NBC built national
networks in the 1920s and 1930s. In countries where radio first emerged
as a public or state service, it was a networked monopoly almost from the
beginning. Later, when independent and local stations emerged (at very
different times in different parts of the world) they too saw the
advantages of networking information and programmes. Networks not
only offer an economic advantage, since spreading the cost of programme
production across several radio stations reduces the cost to each station,
but they also permit a better and more complete service for listeners,
incorporating, for example, national and international news and providing
a distribution channel for third party programs. The problem was that,
until very recently, the only infrastructure within the grasp of independent
radio stations in less-industrialised countries was the postal system, slow
and notoriously unreliable, especially outside major cities.
Despite the distribution problems, many networks did exist in less-
developed countries, especially in Latin America, where independent
alternative radio was invented more than fifty years ago. Initiated by
Chasqui-Huasi in Chile and then taken over by the Asociación
Latinoamericana de Educación Radiofónica (ALER – the Latin American
Association for Radio Education),
Informativo Tercer Mundo
(ITM) was
a weekly news programme distributed by mail on cassette tapes and based
primarily on news from Inter Press Service, a global news service with a
distinctly Southern perspective. Even though it was common for three to
four weeks to pass between the time the news occurred and time the tape
was finally aired, ITM was a fresh change to the normal international

news carried by the stations, which usually consisted of reading news
stories from newspapers bussed in from the capital (and often at least a
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 11 -
few days old), or by retransmitting the news from the international short-
wave services from Europe or the United States.
On a more global scale than ITM, the Developing Countries Farm
Radio Network (DCFRN) has been operating a distribution network since
1979. In its earlier years DCFRN produced radio programmes and mailed
the cassette tapes to stations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Later the
cassettes were replaced by scripts, which broadcasters could more easily
adapt to suit local needs, languages and programme formats.
Long before the Internet was widely available a few small radio
projects were using computers and modems to network radio stations. As
early as 1987 a project based in Central America was sending a weekly
radio news bulletin from the Salvadorean guerrilla station, Radio
Farabundo Marti, to campus and community stations in Canada using a
2400 bps modem connection over an international telephone line. Once
the bulletin reached Canada it was redistributed to stations via fax and a
pre-Internet commercial email system.
By the mid 1990s the Internet started to become more widely
available and the Agencia Informativa Púlsar began serving Latin
American stations out of Quito, Ecuador (see chapter 11). The first major
initiative to link independent radio stations via the Internet, Púlsar began
operating in 1996, sending a daily text-only “rip and read” news bulletin
to forty-eight subscribers. Introduced at a time when Internet connectivity
was still difficult in the region, donors, existing networks and
associations, and even the agency’s few subscribers were sceptical. By

the time it ceased operations five years later it was offering a variety of
services, including 15 to 20 news items every day and full audio for
stations that had the capacity to use it, to more than 2,500 subscribers in
fifty countries. Scaleability was one of the most important characteristics
of the Púlsar experiment – stations with poor connectivity could receive
the daily text bulletin by email, while those with better access and
equipment could choose to receive audio clips or to download the full
audio news bulletin from the website.
Internet news exchange projects also emerged on the national and
global levels. Kantor Berita Radio 68H is an Indonesian radio news
agency established in 1999, not long after the end of the authoritarian
Suharto regime (see chapter 10). Suharto had banned independent news
programs and obliged the country’s thousands of radio stations to carry an
official newscast. Suddenly able to broadcast news, radio stations were
unprepared. The only network was the government’s, as were the only
trained radio journalists. The 68H news agency stepped in to support and
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

- 12 -
broaden the country’s fragile democracy. Like Púlsar, 68H also began
modestly, with fourteen member stations exchanging several one-minute
audio programmes each day via the Internet. However, Indonesia’s
Internet infrastructure is not up to the challenges of its geography, with
200 million people scattered across an archipelago of 17,000 islands and
68H now uses a low-cost satellite channel to distribute its programs from
the capital, with the Internet primarily used for receiving programmes
from member stations. By the time 68H celebrated its second anniversary,
it was already Indonesia’s preferred news source, reaching 20 million
listeners all over the country.
Initiated in 2000 as a joint project of Panos (London) and One

World,
InterWorld Radio
commissions journalists to file reports on
economics, the environment, science and technology, human rights and
social change and makes them available via email or on the web (see
chapter 12). Its services include both daily summaries of news stories and
regular features. InterWorld Radio’s programs are intended to be equally
suitable for radio stations in the North and South, although its claim to be
a “global” service is a qualified one, since its services are only offered in
English.
Technically, InterWorld Radio tries to provide something for
everyone. If you have a bad Internet connection, you can get daily text
summaries of its programs by email. If you have a highspeed connection,
you can download broadcast quality versions in either MP3 or RealAudio
format, and if you just want to listen online, lower quality
streaming

audio is available, also in either MP3 or RealAudio format. With digital
technology, offering a variety of formats takes very little time and effort
and helps ensure a wider distribution of the programmes.
Gateways
Making a streaming audio signal available on the Internet is a way of
extending a radio station’s reach; gateway projects do the reverse, using
the radio to extend the reach of the Internet. In the same way that a single
cybercafé or telecentre with a few computers can be an efficient way of
increasing the number of people connected, providing access for dozens
of people with only a few computers, a radio station with thousands of
listeners that makes active use of the Internet can address the problem of
access to the Internet’s wealth of information with a tactic of
digital

multiplication
, multiplying the impact of its Internet connection.
The UNESCO-supported
Kothmale Internet Project
in Sri Lanka is
considered from two different perspectives in this book (see chapters 6
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 13 -
and 7). Kothmale is one of the best-known examples of a radio station
adopting the role of a gateway or community intermediary between its
listeners and the Internet. Located within Kothmale Community Radio, a
semi-autonomous radio station located in an agricultural region, the
Internet Project has two main components: a community telecentre, with
a dedicated line; and
Radio Browsing
, a daily two-hour radio programme
in which broadcasters take the Internet to the community by surfing the
web in search of answers to listener queries. Sifting through the Internet’s
terabytes of data,
Radio Browsing
finds information that is useful to the
communities and then interprets it – making
useful
information
meaningful
. It plays a role that is part search-engine, part librarian, part
journalist and part translator (English is the language of the Internet, but
not of most Sri Lankans).

Kothmale’s
Radio Browsing
model puts the technology on centre
stage, raising its status from back office research tool to virtual studio
guest. At times this can seem needlessly distracting – reading URLs on
the air or listening to the sound of webpages downloading is not engaging
radio. However the decision to make the technology feature almost as
prominently as the content is related to one of the
Radio Browsing

model’s primary objectives to promote the use of the Internet. In addition
to listening about the Internet, listeners are also encouraged to visit the
station to access it directly via the public access computers located there.
While Kothmale is best-known for its model of blending the Internet with
radio, preliminary evaluations indicate that it has been more successful at
promoting Internet use. As one observer remarked, “the reality of the
place is considerably more impressive than the hype!”
Throughout the less-industrialised world there are hundreds of
lower profile examples of stations taking on a gateway function. Some of
these do little more than download news from CNN and other
international sites, but a growing number are discovering the potential of
the Internet and actively searching for and repackaging information to
match local development needs. In Latin America, for example, it is
common for magazine-format programmes to receive questions from
listeners, research them, and then provide advice on the air. Research
resources are whatever is available – a fifteen year old encyclopaedia set,
a local agricultural extension worker, a health clinic – now the Internet is
replacing the outdated encyclopaedia and supplementing local expertise.
A Peruvian experiment is planning something similar in conditions
where local radio stations do not have access to even a basic community

library, much less the Internet or a telephone. The radio stations will be
equipped with short-wave radio transceivers enabling them to
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

- 14 -
communicate with the Intermediate Technology Development Group’s
(ITDG) office, located in the provincial capital many hours away. Using
the transceivers they will relay questions from the community to ITDG,
who will research them using whatever sources they have available,
including not only the Internet but also indigenous expertise and
experience available in the communities. Answers and advice will be sent
back to the station and also included in a database which will be available
on the web and distributed on CD ROM to radio stations and other
information centres in the communities that are equipped with computers.
In this way the database will be not only a living record of the questions
and answers most sought out in the communities, but also a tool for
collecting, ordering and sharing local knowledge.
Of course, while the possibilities are increasing, many problems
will have to be overcome before radio will be able to realise its full
potential as a gateway. In their contribution to this book Attias and
Deflander (chapter 4) detail many of the barriers that must be overcome
by broadcasters in West Africa attempting to incorporate the Internet into
their work. Access to infrastructure, cost of equipment and use, language
and lack of appropriate and meaningful content are among the familiar
factors that complicate efforts to incorporate the Internet into
programming, but there are others, many of them more complex and more
deeply rooted in culture and society. These include social hierarchies,
inflexible administrative structures of the radio stations themselves, and
cultural differences that make it more difficult to use the Internet. For
example, the icons on a webpage that make it

intuitive
to one user, may
be a code that has to be broken by a another user with a different
background and set of cultural symbols.
On the positive side, the barriers faced by a radio station are much
easier to overcome than those by individual users simply because the
reward is greater. While individual users might find it difficult to get
training and impossible to have content produced to serve his/her
particular needs, training, support and even customised content is more
readily available to radio broadcasters. Attias and Deflander propose
solutions that include national “flagship” stations with expertise and
access to the Internet. These centres would repackage and redistribute
content to other stations, using whatever means is available, including
conventional means such as cassettes and CD ROMs distributed by mail.
The Russian Rural Information Network, described by Nancy Bennett in
Chapter 9 proposes another model for supporting and simplifying local
broadcasters’ work by centrally packaging information for further
processing at the local level according to specific community needs.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 15 -
Communication with migrants
While the above initiatives build on expanding the reach of the Internet
through traditional and geographically defined communities, the
configuration and location of communities is also changing, creating new
needs and opportunities. Radio and the Internet are playing a role here, as
well.
With an estimated 75 million short and medium term international
migrant workers and their dependants in the world today, international

migration is both a consequence and a driving force of globalisation.
Most of these workers retain, or would like to retain close ties with
families and communities in their countries of origin.
9
These ties,
enhanced and supported by the use of ICTs, make a significant
contribution to development in a number of important ways.
On the one hand, migration has an important economic impact.
Twelve years ago migrant workers sent a total of $65 billion home – $20
billion more than the total amount of official development aid at the time.
In many countries money sent home amounts to one of the largest single
sources of foreign currency, often
the
largest.
Perhaps of even greater value than their financial contribution,
migrant communities also contribute their knowledge and expertise to the
development of their communities, often using the Internet. Quipunet
10

and the Lanka Academic Network
11
(Lacnet) are two Internet-based
projects that have sought to make the Diaspora’s resources available to
support educational and development projects in Peru and Sri Lanka
respectively.
Radio stations often play a role linking migrant communities with
their homes and cultures. Stations in the home country will broadcast
news from migrant communities, even to the point of maintaining
correspondents in important migration destinations. In some cases
migrant communities secure a few hours a week on community or multi-

lingual stations in their new host country and broadcast programmes with

9
Those who stay behind also want to communicate and one of the main reasons
people in developing countries start using ICTs is to communicate with family
members who have migrated. See, for example, the work of Ana Maria Fernandez
Maldonado in which she argues that one the main factors behind the growth of
Internet in Peru is the desire of residents to communicate with the more than one
million Peruvians living in the United States.
<www.bk.tudelft.nl/users/fernande/internet/Barcelona.pdf>.
10
<www.quipunet.org>
11
<www.lacnet.org>
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

- 16 -
news and cultural content from “home” mixed with content related to the
new environment. New information and communication technologies are
expanding the possibilities.
More than a decade ago, predating the Internet’s appearance in the
country, emigrants from the Kayes region of Mali living in France
maintained regular contact with Kayes Rural Radio as a way of getting
news from home. When the station faced a sudden financial crisis brought
on, in part, by the sudden loss of donor assistance from Italy, the support
group quickly went to work printing leaflets and raising money to keep
the station going. Working together with the station, the group also came
up with a novel idea for making money – a fax machine was installed in
the station and the residents in France were able to pay a fee and have
their faxed messages read out over the radio station.

12
A similar
experience is discussed in the chapter on emerging developments in radio
message services in Mexico (chapter 13). Radio stations located in rural
areas without telephone service have always provided a messaging
service, dedicating up to several hours per day to broadcast personal
messages to and from people who may live many hours or even days
from each other. The addition of the Internet to this “airwave mail”
service extends its reach and its usefulness for linking migrants and
communities.
Webcasting is becoming increasingly common, with thousands of
radio stations world-wide making some or all of their programming
available over the Internet. While there are few webcast listeners in
developing countries, an increasing number of stations are making their
programmes available.
Radio Ondas Azuayas
13
in Cuenca, Ecuador, a
country that has seen 10 percent of its population leave in the past two
years as a result of an economic crisis, directs its webcasts at Ecuadorians
in the USA and Spain. In addition to informing them of local events, the
station also maintains a voicemail box in the United States. Listeners to
the webcasts can record messages which are then sent to the station as
audio files via the Internet and broadcast over the air. In this way
emigrants can not only listen to the station, but actually participate in
programming.
14
Also Ecuador-based,
Callos y Guatitas
(chapter 14) uses

12
See Pascal Berqué, “The Hard Lesson of Autonomy: Kayes Rural Radio,” in Bruce
Girard (ed)
A Passion for Radio
, Black Rose Books, Canada, 1992. An electronic
edition of this book is online at <www.comunica.org/passion/>.
13
<www.ondasazuayas.satnet.net/>
14
There are a number of services that offer free or low-cost voice-mail numbers in
European, North American and a few Asian countries. A person living in the USA
dials a local phone number and records a voice-mail message which is automatically
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 17 -
radio stations in two countries, the Internet and a satellite to facilitate a
weekly interactive programme linking Ecuadorian migrants in Spain with
their home communities.
The way forward
Like the ship radio operators in 1906 who were surprised to hear a human
voice over their Morse code equipment, rural inhabitants in some of the
remotest parts of the world are now tapping into the digital world via their
radios.
The 21
st
century challenge is to strategize the best formulation for
ensuring the benefits of the Internet reach the digital deserts, where
affordable access to the technology is not available and where effective

use faces a series of cultural, linguistic and content-related challenges.
Knowledge for development research has highlighted the imperative of
spreading access to information resources. Building and improving ICT
infrastructure will be an important element of a strategy aimed at making
information
available
, but a successful strategy must also focus on
ensuring that information is
meaningful
within an existing knowledge
infrastructure. Radio broadcasters throughout the world are becoming
aware of the role they can play in this.
There are many lessons to be learned from the contributions to this
book. It is clear, for example, that the blending of old and new
communication and information technologies has the potential of making
a valuable contribution to development and democracy. It is also clear
that there is no single model and that like all development communication
projects, there are basic principles that must be kept in mind.
Technology is not necessarily the barrier
As we will see in the examples highlighted in this book, access to new
ICTs need not be understood to be
the
significant barrier to participating
in an information society or even to using the Internet for development.
There is no need to wait until access to the Internet is universal before
capitalising on the development opportunities it offers.
We should not underestimate what can be done when limited
technology is combined with determination and imagination (nor should
we underestimate the levels of determination and imagination available).

forwarded to the subscriber’s (in this case a radio station) email account as a .wav file
for broadcast.
Bruce Girard – Mixing Media

- 18 -
ICTs are adaptable and if basic tools and knowledge are available, people
will find a way to make the technology serve their communication needs.
Adaptability and decentralisation are the fundamental characteristics that
have made radio so enduring and effective because they have allowed for
different approaches to its use in terms of range, interactivity and content,
enabling it to integrate so effectively with existing social communication
networks and practices.
Rather than convenient one-size-fits-all type solutions, radio ICT
projects should emphasise adaptability and decentralisation, choosing, for
example, technological solutions that are scaleable – allowing users (both
radio stations and listeners) to define and refine levels of sophistication
and interactivity depending on communication needs, practices and the
level of access that is available to them.
Technology is not a panacea
Technology can play an ambiguous role in the pursuit of goals such as
pluralism, decentralisation and democratic development. The initiatives
discussed in this book all aim at promoting these goals, but it is easy to
identify uses for the technology that could efficiently deprive local
communities of their autonomy and limit pluralism on the airwaves. In
the United States, for example, the introduction of digital satellite
technology that enabled relatively low-cost radio networks was
accompanied by a frenzy of purchases that has seen thousands of
independent stations absorbed by a handful of networks.
15
Formerly

independent stations have replaced local programming with network
programming in a move that has limited the diversity of the nation’s
radio. The same is happening in Argentina, Brazil, Peru and many other
South American countries.
Fifteen years ago
rural radio
in Africa was not local. It was a
model of State paternalism in which programs were produced by experts
in the cities and beamed to “ignorant” peasants in the countryside on the
State radio frequencies. This has changed and rural radio is now local and
participatory. However, it will be sadly ironic if the introduction of
network technologies results in the emergence of a new commercial
paternalism. Similarly, while emerging models of community multimedia
centres offer the promise of democratic development, it is a promise that

15
One third of US radio stations changed hands between 1996 and 1999. In the more
regulated UK market, the four biggest commercial radio groups owned only one third
of the private stations but accounted for 70 percent of total revenues, with smaller
groups and independent stations struggling to break even.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 19 -
can easily be corrupted if adequate policies and practices designed to
keep them responsive to community needs are not in place.
Harnessing knowledge for democratic development
The injection of the Internet’s digital DNA is already changing the nature
of radio and will undoubtedly mean that the radio’s next generation will
be a new species, with a different sound and a different way of relating to

its community. The projects discussed in this book offer some insight into
what that might be like in the developing world, but they represent only
the first few steps in the transformation of the two media. There are
tremendous opportunities for broadcasters but in order to take advantage
of them we will have to experiment and to develop visions that respond to
the distinct needs and desires of our communities.
It has been said that the Internet is a window to the world –
offering an view that encompasses a wealth of knowledge and
information. Local radio is a mirror that reflects a community’s own
knowledge and experience back at it. The convergence of the two just
might offer us the most effective avenue we have yet known to combine
research and reflection in order to harness knowledge for democratic and
sustainable development.

> > > – < < <
Bruce Girard
is a researcher, writer and educator active in development
communication and communication rights issues. He was the founder of
the Agencia Informativa Púlsar and of Comunica, a network focusing on
the use of new ICTs by independent media in the South. He has lectured
on broadcasting, information and communication technologies, and
communication rights in more than 25 countries. His other books are
A
Passion for Radio,
an edited volume of stories from community radio
stations around the world, and
Global Media Governance
.
<www.comunica.org>

- 20 -


-
21
-
Chapter 2

Take Five:
A handful of essentials for
ICTs in development

Alfonso Gumucio Dagron
The point of the lance
New information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the
Internet, have shown a very rapid development during the past ten years.
The number of Internet users has been doubling every year since 1995.
No other ICT in the past has, by comparison, developed so fast. Radio
took several decades to be adopted in the isolated and poor rural areas of
the world until it became the most important means of communication for
many marginalised communities. Television is still struggling to reach the
periphery, through a combination of cable and an array of satellites,
although portable video has proved its efficacy for educational purposes.
The Internet, in its own right, has become fashionable and is being put
forth as the “point of the lance” of a technological revolution that also
claims to be a social revolution. We will see to what extent this might be
true.
Symbiosis

The most important and interesting issue relating to the rapid expansion
of new ICTs in Third World Countries
1
is not the Internet itself, but the
potential of its interaction with other electronic media, such as radio and
eventually television. This “convergence” is, no doubt, the best option for
the future. Internet-based technologies will have to learn from the fifty-
year experience of community radio, if they are to become the tool for
social change that it is hoped. Likewise, radio and television will certainly
benefit from the speed and reach offered by the new ICTs. This symbiosis
is already changing the approach to technology development in

1
I prefer to use the term “Third World” rather than “developing countries”, a
fashionable way to call many countries that have actually been going backwards in
terms of economic and social development.
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 22 -
industrialised countries, but the social concepts that should be embedded
are lagging behind.
Radio is the most impressive communication tool for development,
especially in the rural context. It is not only an important mechanism for
the diffusion of development information in local languages and over
widespread and remote geographical areas; it is also a great tool for
reinforcing and strengthening cultural expressions and identities.
Moreover, it can be a platform for democratic discussion and pluralistic
expression of ideas and aspirations of rural communities, as well as a
means to raise awareness on social issues and to collect data on local
development issues. It can contribute to the development of local pride

through the reinstatement of community memory and history.
Can the new ICTs do the same? They should and they must, if they
are to be sustainable and to contribute to social change and development.
ICTs – Field of Dreams
New ICTs are hailed as the long-awaited solution for the poor of the
world. Some, either too optimistic or not very conversant with actual
experiences in the field, are even talking about the “dramatic opportunity
to leapfrog into the future, breaking out of decades of stagnation and
decline.”
2
The argument is that ICTs can easily convey to the
marginalised, poor and under-developed, the truth about development and
the information that will enlighten them to take, on their own, the steps
that will improve their condition.
ICTs are seen as the fire of knowledge graciously brought to the
damned of the world by the wise Prometheus of industrialised countries.
3

However, this modern Prometheus should know that the attempt is too
similar to the failed
diffusion of innovation
trend that was fashionable in
the world of agricultural development in the sixties. As Kunda Dixit
wrote:
Like the fashion business, the Third World development
debate seems to go through fads and styles. Mantras come,
and mantras go. The latest buzzword is “knowledge”. The
world is now a Knowledge Society, we are told, and the
global gap between know and know-not is growing, therefore

2
The World Bank: “Increasing Internet connectivity in Sub-Saharan Africa”, 1996.
3
See Alfonso Gumucio, “Prometheus Riding a Cadillac? Telecentres as the promised
flame of knowledge” in the
Journal of Development Communication
, Vol. 12, No. 2
(February 2002).
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 23 -
the only way to give the poor the chance to catch up is to
pump in more knowledge with computers and through the
Internet.
4

Among the risks, adds Dixit, is that “the knowledge hype may
tempt us to regard only formal modern knowledge systems as worthy of
attention.”
A bit of historical perspective could help to avoid the same old
mistakes and to better understand the deep roots of poverty. The real
causes of underdevelopment are social injustice, exploitation of poor
countries by rich countries as well the poor within each country by the
rich upper classes that control government, financial institutions, services
and the productive sector. Knowledge alone will not change that
situation.
“
If you build it they will come
”.

5
In the field of dreams of ICT
promoters the picture is rather simple: ICTs and Internet connectivity are
per se
the solution for poverty and underdevelopment. Place computers
and connectivity at the reach of the poor and they will magically defeat
poverty. Some international consultants feel good when they arrive at the
most isolated villages of Mali or Bolivia with a laptop under their arm.
They show the magic screen in action, the same way the Spaniards
showed shiny mirrors to subdue the Incas or the Aztecs during the
Conquest of America.
In the process of generating ideas – or appropriating them –
academics, commercial wizards and development bureaucrats in Europe
and North America love to invent new acronyms and buzz words, often to
name what already exists. Now we are in the middle of a fashion of
placing an “e” – for “electronic”, before almost every substantive word:
“e-commerce”, “e-care”, “e-learning”, “e-support”, “e-government”, “e-
mail”, “e-forum”, “e-groups”… They have gone as far as to introduce “e-
development”. Peter Ballantyne suggests that the “e” should stand for
“effective”, “empowered” and “efficient”.
6

Development is much more complex than planting ICT seeds in
poor rural areas or marginalised urban neighbourhoods. If it were so
simple, we would not have seen the dramatic events in Argentina early in
2002. A well-developed country, in the frontline of the adoption of ICTs
and with a good telephone system and electricity service, is in the midst

4
Kunda Dixit, “Exiled to Cyberia”

Himal
, Vol. 12, No. 11 (Novermber 1999)
<www.himalmag.com/99Nov/cyberia.htm>.
5
Now a classic phrase from the Hollywood film,
Field of Dreams
.
6

Peter Ballantyne: “e-Development: What’s in a name?”. <www.iconnect-online.org>, Dec. 14, 2001.

Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 24 -
of a deep economic and social crisis, going backwards instead of
“leapfrogging” into the future.
7
ICTs are not a magic solution for
anything.
This is not the first time we have been confronted with the idea that
technology is a panacea for economic and social change. Those who have
been active in development during the past thirty years know very well
the theories of
innovation diffusion
, by which underdeveloped countries
would magically join the industrialised world through the use of modern
technology graciously provided by international agencies. Behind this
recipe was the assumption that knowledge is the privilege of
industrialised nations, and that countries in the South just didn’t have
enough of it. It could only be that simple in the field of dreams of those

who know little about the reality of Third World countries, but think they
know what is best for them.
At the risk of repeating something that everyone already knows, we
should remind ICT pushers that when we deal with technology we are
only handling instruments, and we are not
per se
affecting the social,
economic or cultural environment. A knife is just a knife, a tool that can
be used to hurt someone or to carve a beautiful wood sculpture. Content
and patterns of utilisation make the difference. A few organisations
recognise this and promote a
social vision
of ICTs:
It is clear that ICTs are neither a sufficient nor a necessary
condition for development. However, it is also evident that
ICTs, primarily driven by commercial interests, are here to
stay. It is therefore urgent that a social vision that puts the
Internet at the service of development be strengthened. The
social vision proposed rests on four central elements: 1)
Going beyond connectivity; 2) Promoting enabling
environments; 3) Minimising threats and risks; and 4)
Maximising positive results. In the social vision proposed,
ICTs are not inherently necessary or beneficial. The
challenge is, precisely, to be able to tell when, and under
what conditions, the Internet can contribute to development.
8

Development priorities are to be analysed – hopefully by the
beneficiaries
– before deciding which technology is appropriate, where

and how. Communities should adapt technology to their needs and to

7
In the early nineties President Menem decreed that Argentina was a “first world”
country.
8
Ricardo Gómez and Juliana Martínez,
Internet… Why? and What for?
, IDRC and
Fundación Acceso, 2001. <www.acceso.or.cr/PPPP/index_en.shtml>.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 25 -
their culture, not the opposite. In spite of this, let’s not forget that most
grassroots ICT experiences are less than five years old. It is too soon to
claim victory and too soon to discard them, but not too soon to question
whether they will be sustainable and benefit their communities after the
external inputs withdraw. Today, ICTs in Third World countries are
experiments with a potential. What is written in well-intentioned project
proposals and triumphant reports to donors is one thing. What really
happens at the community level might be quite another.
Let’s look at our fistful of non-negotiable conditions for ICTs in
development:
1. Community Ownership
Problems

A rapid assessment of the large numbers of Internet based
experiences that have been developed in the past five years, namely the so
called “telecentres”, “cabinas públicas”, “telecottages”

9
, “telehuts”,
“digital centres”, “information kiosks”, “infocentros”, “infoplazas”,
“information shops”, “community multimedia centres”
10
, “village
knowledge centres”
11
– among other names
12
– indicates that most of them
were initiated with little regard for community participation and
ownership. The contest between organisations, both public and private, to
“connect” under-developed countries has resulted in the parachuting of
thousands of computers into areas where safe water and electricity are not
even available.
An assessment of ICTs for development conducted by the FAO in
2001 revealed that many projects are implemented without any
consultation with the community. Among the findings:
•
only a limited number of community-driven ICT initiatives were
found and these had scarce visibility;
•
participatory needs assessments are rarely performed prior to the
establishment of telecentres;

9
Telecottages emerged initially during the eighties in Scandinavia. The term is
currently used in some countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
10

These have been developed with support from UNESCO in Eastern and central
Europe, and various countries of Asia and Africa (see chapter 6 for more
information).
11
This is the name given to their telecentres by the M. S. Swaminathan Research
Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai (India).
12
Many of them are just cybercafés, purely commercial ventures.
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 26 -
•
the emphasis is more often on providing access than on innovative
ways of applying ICTs to the specific needs of communities and
local groups;
•
the priorities of many ICT projects tend to be influenced more by
the interests of external organisations rather than community-based
organisations;
•
the thematic sectors applied often reflect an economic, market-
related focus;
•
there is a lack of local participation in the creation of content and
selection of ICTs tools;
•
there are many telecentres where computers are available but where
a lack of awareness, ICT skills, and literacy hinder the process of
local appropriation.
13

We have all heard of ICT projects that have folded after one or two
years because the computers were stolen or deteriorated so quickly that
they needed to be replaced. This is more likely to happen when
communities do not have the sense of ownership of the project and do not
feel that the installations are essential to their social and economic
development. It is not a matter of external supervision (although this may
help), but a matter of community awareness and social appropriation of
the project.
Challenges

The involvement of communities in ICT projects that are set up for
their benefit – or any other project aiming social and economic
development – is the first non-negotiable pre-condition.
In this area there is much to learn from the experience of
community radio. We can not claim social change without community
participation, and this should take place from the first discussions about
the potential of providing ICT support to a particular region. It is certainly
not enough to discuss with government authorities or even with local
authorities. This may seem to be a good short-cut to get things rolling, but
the short-cut syndrome that characterises some ICT pushers may do more
harm than good. This is not a 100 meter race where speed is everything
you need. Development projects are more marathons, and you will never
finish if you use up all your energy in the first 100 meters. In the words of
Simon Batchelor:

13
Sabine Isabel Michiels and Loy van Crowder:
Local appropriation of ICTs

, FAO
2001. <www.fao.org/sd/2001/KN0602a_en.htm>
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It has now been recognised by many people that working
from the outside towards the centre is a recipe for
unsustainable programmes. Programmes that consider local
capacity start at the centre and plan outwards. Yet it seems
that many ICT programmes and projects start at the outer
edge of the ‘onion’, and with an acknowledged general need
for information and communication, outside agencies put in
significant resources. Computers are installed, infrastructure
is established and some salaries are given to kick start the
cost recovery process
.
14

As with any other development program, an ICT or community
radio project should be first discussed and analysed with representatives
from the communities. A good start would be to ask if they are interested.
Many rural and even urban communities may prefer to have safe water
and electricity first, rather than computers.
15
If community leaders,
representing a wide range of social sectors (youth, women, traditional
leaders, service providers, local authorities, etc.) believe that ICTs are
important, the discussion should focus on how to develop the project and
particularly, what will be the role and responsibilities of the community.

The community may donate the land and take responsibility for
building and maintaining the premises to house the computers and/or the
radio station; and may provide volunteers to run the project. We have
seen this happen in the past with community radio stations in both rural
and urban areas. If we look at the perspectives of sustainability from a
point of view that is not restricted to income generation, we will find that
community involvement and the development of a sense of ownership
over the project, will also be the best guarantee to keep the equipment
safe and in running condition.
There is an opportunity to contribute to the process of community
organisation through an ICT and radio project or any other
communication project that truly aims to ignite the process of social
change. A local committee composed of representatives from the various
social sectors could be formed to oversee the activities of the multimedia
centre.
16
This local committee could also assume responsibility for

14
Simon Batchelor: “ICT capacity development issues” at
<www.gamos.demon.co.uk/sustainable/tfoa2/tfoa2.htm>.
15
In north-western Romania, CREST – a local NGO, has established as a principle
not to start a new telecottage unless the community really wants it and is ready to
participate with some human and/or financial investment.
16
The Community Audio Towers (CATs) in The Philippines, are managed by a
Community Media Council made of representatives from the various sectors of the
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 28 -
conducting certain content-related tasks, as often happens with
community radio stations, where the nurse is in charge of a health
program, the teacher prepares a series on education issues, rural
cooperative leaders arrange to find useful information for farmers, youth
leaders deal with music and topics that interest their peers, and so on.
Simon Batchelor rightly criticises “planning like an onion” and
points to the difference between development programs that are planned
from the outside layers of the community, instead of from the centre. The
arrogant attitude of planners convinced that they know best about
community needs has resulted in decades of failures in development.
This is not to say that communities are always right and their word
is divine. In development we usually learn the difference between the real
needs of a community and the “felt needs”. For example, communities
may easily identify the need of water and roads, but not of immunisation
or education (let alone ICTs!). The key word is dialogue between the
community and the planners. Communities are seldom homogeneous or
fully democratic; as any human group or society, they are fractured in
groups of economic and social interests. The challenge is to support
dialogue through a democratic process of participation.
2. Local Content
Problems

It has been said many times: 90 percent of the content of the World
Wide Web is totally alien to 90 percent of the world’s people. In terms of
“providing knowledge to the poor”, the purpose is defeated, unless the
whole perspective changes. This contradiction is more obvious when we
consider the usefulness of the web for rural communities in the Third
World. High school students, teachers or professionals in Islamabad, Rio
de Janeiro or Dakar may find the web very useful (particularly if they are

fluent in English), but what about a woman working in a factory or a poor
farmer? What in the web will interest them? Where is the knowledge they
can use for their own benefit?
One of the illusions of the Internet is that because it has no central
management, everyone is free to shape it according to their own needs. In

community: women, youth, teachers, nurses, traditional authorities, elders, etc, and it
works well. For more information see the chapter in Gumucio,: “Making Waves:
Participatory Communication for Social Change”, The Rockefeller Foundation, 2001.
<www.rockfound.org/display.asp?Collection=3&context=1&DocID=423&Preview=0
&ARCurrent=1>.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


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fact, the Internet it is very much controlled by commercial rules. The
World Wide Web today looks very much like cable and satellite
television in terms of content. Years ago some thought that satellite and
cable TV would bring a better choice of programmes and more diversity
of information to the world. Today we know it only helped to impose the
mainstream points of view, one image of how life should be, and a very
narrow way of looking at society and reality. The rest of the world only
appears as exotic images in adventure or scientific documentaries. The
corporations that regulate information flows in industrialised and
peripheral countries have captured Internet. To land into a small oasis of
difference in the web, one must navigate through the most implausible
labyrinths.
Several reports of telecentres or multimedia centres in Africa, Asia
and Latin America indicate that the main users are students or teachers,
not the poorest of the community. They also indicate that the main

services that are used in a multimedia centre are the telephone, the
newspapers, the photocopier, the fax and the computer; not the Internet or
the World Wide Web. In fact, many of Africa’s telecentres do not even
offer Internet access. They are actually telephone call centres, perhaps
with as computer or two available for word processing. When available,
rural students and teachers may use the Internet to chat or send e-mail
messages (if they have correspondents), but other social sectors, which
account for the vast majority, approach the telecentre primarily to use the
other services offered.
Challenges

The development of local content is the single most important non-
negotiable condition for the use of ICTs for social change and material
progress in urban or rural communities.
The web’s ocean of “knowledge” does not correspond to the needs
of the majority of the population. Different countries have different
needs, and within each country – particularly in the Third World – the
diversity of cultures and problems calls for specific approaches. We need
to invent and multiply mini-networks, small geographical webs or local
community networks to make the World Wide Web really wide and really
useful for the majority of people on the planet.
Again, community radio can teach us much about local pertinence.
Only the development of local content can establish a radical difference
between the telecentres for social uses, and the cybercafés that cater to
customers who already know what, where and how to look for the
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 30 -
information they need. Cybercafés do not need to develop specific
content because their customers correspond to the typical Internet user

world-wide: male, under 35 years old, with a university education and
high income, urban based and English speaking – a member of the elite
minority for which the Internet is shaped.
17

Cybercafés offer Internet access, but development-oriented
telecentres also generate local and regional information, making it
available to the community. “A telecentre may well become a key
auxiliary to the school and clinic, offering continuing education for local
teachers and nurses (and doctors, if any).”
18

To cater their users – again following the example of community
radio – several community-based ICT projects produce local content,
appropriate to the specific population of peasants, fisher folk or other
groups that are seldom taken into consideration by commercial
cybercafés. Relevant examples include the Village Knowledge Centres in
Chennai, India.
19

It is not difficult to anticipate the symbiosis between community
radio and the Internet. A handful of community based radio stations have
taken the lead in taking advantage of the technological convergence. The
Kothmale Community Radio, in Sri Lanka, is one of these that uses the
Internet to respond to requests for information from its constituency. The
station receives requests, searches the Internet, stores information with
content relevant to the local communities, and broadcasts this
information, translated into local languages.

17

UNDP Human Development Report, 1999.
18
Scott Robinson, “Rethinking Telecenters: Knowledge Demands, Marginal Markets,
Microbanks and Remittance Flows”, in O
n the Internet
, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall/Winter
2000), a publication of the Internet Society
<www.isoc.org/oti/articles/0401/robinson.html>.
19
See, for example, the example of the Village Knowledge Centers in Chennai, India
in “Letters from the field”; Balaji.V., K.G. Rajmohan., R. Rajasekara Pandy and S.
Senthilkumaran: “Toward a knowledge system for sustainable food security. The
information village experiment in Pondicherry.” e-OTI –
On the Internet
: An
International Electronic Publication of the Internet Society, March–April, 2001, pp.
32-37 <www.isoc.org/oti>; “Making Waves: Participatory Communication for Social
Change”, by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron; “Connecting Rural India to the World”, by
Celia W. Dugger, in the
New York Times
, 28 May 2000.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


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3. Appropriate Technology
Problems

When we think that one in every three people globally lacks
electricity and that safe water is a scarce resource in large parts of the

world, we are reminded that computers are still a luxury. The fashion of
planting computers all over the world is a very costly one. How much or
how sophisticated technology do we need, for example, in a rural public
telecentre? In Central America there are rural schools with fewer than 100
students equipped with five or six state-of-the-art computers, that are only
used at maybe five percent of their capacity. What criteria, if any, are
used to determine what hardware and software to buy?
Radio and television has also known – and hopefully learned from
– the distortions caused by planners mechanically applying their
experience in Europe or North America to countries in Africa or Asia. My
personal symbol of waste and distortion in development communication
projects, are the huge Outdoor Broadcast Vans that I saw in Burkina Faso
in the 1980s and 1990s, abandoned in the backyards of radio and
television stations with the tires flat and almost swallowed by
surrounding vegetation. A few were still in working condition, not as
mobile units, but as fixed transmission cabins. The whole purpose of
mobility was defeated since the national broadcasters could never afford
to operate and maintain them.
The lifespan of computer equipment is much more limited than
radio equipment which can last ten or fifteen years. Computers rarely last
for five years, and if they do last that long, they are probably obsolete,
unable to run new software or to communicate with other more recent
models. How sophisticated should computers that are placed at new
telecentres be, especially in rural areas with very little history and
experience in handling ICTs? What percentage of the hardware and
software capacity will be utilised during the two or three year lifespan of
the equipment? Can the computers be repaired locally? Are spare parts
available? Where can one buy a computer designed to last rather than to
be replaced?
Unfortunately, the practice of development aid does not follow any

critical path or reasonable criteria. Once funds have been allocated to a
project, they have to be spent; even if that means buying inappropriate
equipment. With major players in the development world, such as the
Open Society Institute (Soros), the World Bank and USAID competing
for territory and influence, we may not see things getting better soon;
unless other international players such as IDRC, APC, IICD or OneWorld
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 32 -
– better known for their substance than their funding resources – can
positively influence the general trend.
The Internet is now being driven strongly by commercial
forces and the Internet sector in developing countries is now
highly competitive, profitable and likely to flourish, with or
without the help of donors. Sufficient demand for the Internet
exists even in the poorest countries to make it a viable,
indeed highly profitable, venture. If the market is ensuring
rapid Internet growth, donors and NGOs need to focus on
ensuring access and benefits for the less advantaged.
20

Challenges

The third non-negotiable condition for ICTs for development and
social change is the use of appropriate tools: Technology that is adequate
to the needs of communities, not in terms of technical standards alone,
but it terms of utilisation, learning and adoption.
The tools are appropriate when the community develops a sense of
ownership, through a continuous process of appropriation of the project.
This appropriation should not be understood as mere adoption of

technology or the development of skills to handle hardware and software.
The acquisition of skills is an important step, but not the final one. Other
issues are important: management, production of local content, research
methods, training and outreach activities, to name a few.
Why use a Rolls Royce to drive to the corner store for bread when
a bicycle will do the job just as well and be more sustainable? ICT
pushers do not seem to get this concept, in spite of the fact that it has been
around since the fifties in the development world. The terminology of
appropriate technology was born after decades of failures in huge
development installations that became white elephants –useless and
empty structures that were never put to work for the benefit of
communities. There is a wealth of literature on the missed opportunities
for development, and most has to do with top-down planning and large
investments.
As is done with many small community radio stations, it may be
reasonable to start a telecentre or a multimedia centre with the basic
hardware and software, and observe for year or two to see if there is a real
need to upgrade. New technologies offer a wide range of choices, but

20

The Internet and Poverty: Real help or real hype?
, Panos Media Briefing No. 28,
April 1998 <www.oneworld.org/panos/briefing/interpov.htm>.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


- 33 -
unfortunately very few planners or external advisors seem to consider
them. Most are locked-in to Microsoft and expensive Intel-based

computers, and do not even consider, for example, the Simputer – a
computer developed in India to sell for under US$200, or Linux – the free
operating system that can make any computer performs as a server.
Nevertheless, for community radio stations converging with
Internet, the needs might be more sophisticated. More speed, better
connectivity and more memory and storage capacity are needed. It is
more convenient to edit and store radio programs digitally. Computers are
of enormous help for laying out programme grids and for limiting the
manual handling of cassettes, tapes and CDs. Many small community
stations in the Third World already have computers, and have used them
to improve the technical quality of their work. Others have websites with
information on programming and even stored or live audio programmes.
4. Language & Culture Pertinence
Problems

Only five years ago, about 90 percent of the total web pages
accessible through the Internet were in English. Today, according to some
studies, this proportion has been reduced to 50 percent. Of the 6 billion
people in the world, only about 341 million speak English as first
language. Spanish is the mother tongue of 358 million people, but is
represented in only 5.62 percent of web pages.
21
English is not the most
spoken language in the world, but it is by far the most represented on the
Internet, to the point that websites in many non-English speaking
countries of Europe and the Third World are often English.
This situation is quickly evolving. The Internet has been growing
faster in Latin America than in the United States and Europe and over the
past five years there has been a significant growth in the amount of
Spanish-language content. This may be an optimistic signal for major

modern languages, but what about the rest? Where in the web are the rest
of the world’s more than six thousand languages, and how many will
disappear from the Earth before they appear in cyberspace?
Language is only the tip of the iceberg. Culture is the hidden mass
of it. The rich diversity of cultures in our world is not represented on the
Internet and the World Wide Web. Moreover, the expansion of the

21
Daniel Pimienta and Benoit Lamey: “Lengua española y culturas hispánicas en la
Internet: comparación con el inglés y el francés”, October 2001. At <funredes.org>
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 34 -
Internet in its current shape may be contributing to the annihilation of
under-represented cultures. As a report from IDRC points out:
The content, language, class, and culture that dominate the
Internet can have negative effects by generating a uniformity
of ideas, preferences, and world visions. The illusion of
increased democracy and plurality produced by the
interactive capacity of the Internet may be misleading if it, in
fact, reinforces existing relationships of centralized control
and domination in society.
22

It is difficult to measure the presence of diverse cultures on the
Internet, and some recent attempts are misleading and too subjective. The
fact that very popular
Latin
singers or entertainment stars have an
outstanding presence in Internet is not an indication of cultural diversity.

How much do Ricky Martin, Antonio Banderas or Santana, artists known
because of their success in the United States, contribute to cultural
diversity?
If culture is in the soul of development and social change, how
much more beautiful would be, for example, to witness the “Eighth Art”
emerge from Internet, something so new and innovative and culturally
adaptable that it can repeat the extraordinary feat of the other seven arts
and truly help advance human values.
Challenges

The fourth important non-negotiable condition for ICT projects in
the context of development and social change is, therefore, language and
cultural pertinence.
Without the presence of local cultures and languages, there can be
no possibility of ICTs contributing to the progress of communities.
Language and cultural identity are at the core of any successful
intervention with ICTs.
History has taught us that it is healthy for cultures to mix and
evolve through a process of dialogue and interaction. No great culture has
ever remained “pure” or uncontaminated. Cultural interactions are
responsible for some of the highlights of the advancement of humanity.
However, the electronic age has made the terms of “cultural exchange”
far too unbalanced, as uneven as those that characterise modern
commercial exchanges. The rules of the game are dictated unilaterally.

22
Op. cit. Ricardo Gómez and Juliana Martínez:
Internet… Why and What for?

The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity

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Cultures already weakened and divided are easily wiped out by the tidal
waves of the market.
To balance cultural interaction in cyberspace is not an easy task.
Even if we get to a point where more web pages are produced with
content that is representative of our cultural diversity, we will have to
make them visible. The web is more an ocean than a library. It takes a lot
to fish the appropriate information, because, for example, most of the
popular search engines prioritise the pages that recently had many hits,
not necessarily the best pages on a particular topic. Many of the pages
that pop up first are commercial sites that have paid the search engines in
order to appear in a better position. It is hard for a website using a
“marginal” language to be found, even by those who share the language,
harder still if the subject of it is culturally irrelevant to the current
mainstream.
This situation will only improve if more and better local content is
produced. We need hundreds of thousands of new pages reflecting the
diversity of cultures and languages, pages that revive the memory of
communities, their collective history, their artistic expressions, past and
current. Community radio has had this role during the past decades, and
that is why it is so important for new ICTs to piggyback on its experience.
The convergence of radio and Internet provides useful examples of how
to create local content, relevant to local needs but also to local culture,
and provide this content in local languages. The Village Knowledge
Centres in India, Kothmale Community Radio in Sri Lanka and Púlsar in
Latin America, are a handful of experiences from which to learn.
5. Convergence & Networking
Problems

Out of the blue, ICT projects are parachuted into places where
there is no previous history of local participation in development
initiatives, no convergence with other programs for development and
social change or with existing community organisations or local
grassroots media, and no networking with other ICT projects that share
similar goals. Would it not be far more reasonable to search for
institutional alliances with local organisations, with existing community
media, with public libraries and schools, and with projects that are
already affecting the social, political and economic tissue of the society?
Starting ICT projects with no connection to other initiatives has
been questioned numerous times. “It is more beneficial to use ICTs to
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 36 -
enhance existing practices than to promote new activities for the primary
purpose of using ICTs. In this light, the creation of telecentres that are
disconnected from existing community organisations and initiatives is
unlikely to contribute to development.”
23
Nevertheless, it continues to
happen. This isolation of ICT projects from other initiatives with similar
aims and perspectives may be one of the reasons for so many failures.
We also need to break the western concept of the isolated and
closed relationship between the individual and the computer, and evolve
towards the collective use of ICTs. Often, telecentre projects reproduce
the pattern of individualism. There may be several computers and people
in the same room but it does not change anything. From the point of view
of sustainability it is crucial to think in terms of a larger community of
networks of users with similar interests.

Various authors and organisations have noted the risk of building
networks that separate human beings and establish patterns of
communication that are mediated only by technology and not values.
“Might the web of the future turn out to be a vast, fragmented network of
isolated individuals –human bees in their cells– interacting with data
instead of with one another?” asks the Pontifical Council for Social
Communication.
24
“We must be sure that the virtual community is at the
service of real communities, not a substitute for them,” adds the Anglican
Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey.
Challenges

Convergence and networking are non-negotiable conditions for
long-term sustainability. ICT projects that are converging towards other
communication projects such as community radio have better chances to
succeed, because they will be inheriting a vast quantity of accumulated
experience and a whole history of development and participation.
Similarly, initiatives using ICTs that complement existing social
development projects, for the same reasons above, are more likely to be
accepted by the community and to strengthen ongoing activities aimed at
social change.
This brings to mind several important examples of convergence of
ICTs and existing local institutions or media. In Peru, ITDG is supporting
the InfoDes project, which is converging with rural public libraries.
25


23
Op. cit. Ricardo Gómez and Juliana Martínez:

Internet… Why and What for?

24
Jim McDonnell: “Virtual Communities – a comment”.
Cine&Media
, 3/2001.
25
More information on InfoDes in “Making Waves: Participatory Communication for
Social Change”, by Alfonso Gumucio Dagron; and <www.infodes.org.pe>.
The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity


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Púlsar in Latin America used the Internet to feed regional news to
hundreds of community and indigenous radio stations. We have already
mentioned Kothmale Community Radio in Sri Lanka, and the Indonesian
network of local radio stations linked via e-mail.
26

Convergence between radio and Internet is the most promising,
however it will face different challenges in the Third World and in
industrialised countries. As Bruce Girard sees it:
It is clear that convergence will impact on broadcasters in
developing countries in a very different way than in Europe
and North America. While in the developed world there are
predictions that new media and the Internet may soon
become substitutes for broadcast services and distribution
systems, in the developing countries this will not happen in
the foreseeable future. Radio will continue to be the most
important medium for the vast majority of the world’s

inhabitants and television will continue to have a
recognisable form in the first years of the 21
st
century.
27

Schools are another important platform for ICT development, not
only because they exist even in the most remote rural areas of our
countries, but also because in terms of skills, teachers and students are
more likely to adopt the new technologies. It is important, however, to
ensure the interaction with the community as a whole, to avoid creating a
closed structure for a small privileged group.
If what we are striving for is development for social change, the
convergence between ICTs and development NGOs has enormous
potential. Many have realised this and are already developing a handful of
valuable experiences. We are not referring to NGOs equipping
themselves with computers and connectivity to better perform their tasks;
there is no major feat there. The real challenge is to use ICTs as another
tool in the development work, as the M.S. Swaminathan Research
Foundation (MSSRF) is doing in Chennai, India. The project goes far
beyond providing computers and connectivity to poor communities: it has
an important component of developing local content in “value addition”
centres, and enabling users to easily access information that meets their
needs. The Village Knowledge Centres are a good example, both of
converging tools and networking on the local level.

26
Editor’s note: The author is writing of a UNESCO-backed Indonesian network, not
Radio 68H which is featured in this book
27

Bruce Girard: “Converging Responsibility, Broadcasting and the Internet in
Developing Countries”. <www.comunica.org/kl/girard.htm>.
Alfonso Gumucio – Take Five

- 38 -
Known as “citizen networks” these are described by Steve Cisler as
“Internet technology projects that benefit people as citizens rather than as
consumers; projects that help marginalised groups have more control over
their existence and even give them a stronger sense of identity. Citizen
networks are about inclusion and how the technology can be used for
democratic goals and for economic development.”
28
In the same article
Cisler mentions Manuel Castells, who believes that in our increasingly
globalised world community networks are a key element in building
social institutions.
Last but not least
I am aware of the potential of Internet for development because I am one
of those privileged people in the world that:
1. Have electricity,
2. Have a phone line,
3. Have a computer,
4. Have enough to pay for the service provider, and
5. Reads and writes English.

However, I don’t need just
any
kind of Internet, and that is precisely what
we have now, any kind with little to do with the vast majority of people
of the world. The same as for television, quantity seems to reign over

quality.
It is becoming increasingly crucial to define communication
projects for development and social change and to prevent the reigning
confusion with commercial ventures. The five non-negotiable conditions
discussed here may facilitate the task.
> > > – < < <
Alfonso Gumucio
is a writer and development communication specialist
with experience in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. He is
the author of
Making Waves: Stories of Participatory Communication for
Social Change.

www.comminit.com/making-waves.html


28
Steve Cisler: “II Global Congress of Citizen Networks, Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
December 2001 at home.inreach.com/cisler/ba.htm


-
39
-
Chapter 3

Linking Rural Radio to New
ICTs in Africa:
Bridging the rural digital
divide

Jean-Pierre Ilboudo
and
Riccardo del Castello
Introduction
More than eighty developing countries suffer from chronic food deficits
and about eight hundred million people live in hunger. By 2025, the
world’s population may exceed eight billion and food needs in
developing countries may double. The challenge for these countries and
for their development partners is to assist farmers in achieving food
security – the basic right of people to have access to the food they need.
This challenge is most critical in low-income, food-deficit countries
where little progress in food production has been made in recent decades,
leading to a dramatic increase in the number of chronically
undernourished people.
The challenge of ensuring food security in developing countries
calls for new technologies, skills, practices and ways to collaborate. Most
importantly, farmers must be able to communicate with peers, local
authorities and institutions and have access to relevant knowledge and
information, including technical, scientific, economic, social and cultural
information. It is essential for rural people to be able to respond
productively to the opportunities and challenges of economic and
technological change, including those that can improve agricultural
productivity and food security. However, to be useful, information must
be available to the users in appropriate languages and formats. At the
same time, it must also be up-to-date and communicated through
appropriate channels.
Since the beginning of the 1990s a dramatic expansion in
information services and a proliferation of technological innovations has
Jean-Pierre Ilboudo and Riccardo del Castello – The Rural Digital Divide

- 40 -
permeated virtually all spheres of human activity. The depth and the
extent of these processes appear limitless and have had much greater
social, economic and cultural implications than experienced during
previous technological advances. The so-called Information Age,
characterised by a world-wide increase in the reach of mass media and
the emergence of the Internet, is affecting the way we communicate,
create relationships and undertake transactions, opening up new
opportunities and challenges. Developing countries have not been
excluded from these processes. Despite the seemingly huge difficulties in
infrastructure development, their governments have taken steps to adapt
to the new digital environment and to avail themselves of new tools,
products and services.
With the emergence of new opportunities there is however a
growing concern about a new kind of threat to global development which
has fuelled an animated world-wide debate over the social impact of ICTs
on the lives of people. In the North-South context discussion has focused
on the role of technology in widening or narrowing the knowledge gap
between rich and poor countries. The situation is even more dramatic for
people in rural and isolated areas of developing countries, where access to
basic telecommunication services and educational resources can make a
real difference in combating poverty and improving living conditions.
These people have no access to the mechanisms that would enable them
to voice their opinions, communicate with authorities and the main
development actors or increase their participation in decision-making
processes. The gap is thus growing not only between North and South,
but also, and more dramatically, within the South, between the urban elite
and middle classes and the most underprivileged populations living in
rural areas.
Impressive breakthroughs in information technology and its

increasing presence in everyday life have led some observers to believe
that ICTs would provide immediate solutions to development problems.
The initial optimism of these technology enthusiasts has been tempered in
more recent years by a close scrutiny of actual technology applications at
the local level.
ICTs are perceived as being able to facilitate speedy integration of
rural areas and to enable the enhancement of a number of sectors
including education, health care, small enterprises and agriculture.
However, for this to be sustainable and effective, communities must have
effective and affordable access to ICTs. For a variety of reasons, they do
not. An option that is being increasingly considered involves developing
communication strategies based on an integrated approach which relies